Digital content providers (e.g., streaming video network content providers) need to control the availability of their content. This control is often more than preventing access to non-subscribers, and for example may need to deal with the availability of content (or not) among client subscribers. For example, a large number of television programs may be present on a server (e.g., of a datacenter/content delivery network) that serves South American clients, however viewers in Argentina may not have access to the same television programs that viewers in Columbia can access. There is thus a locale-based consideration with respect to program availability. In addition to locale, there are typically other factors for deciding whether a given client has access to a given piece of content.
Regardless of whether the programs themselves can be blocked from certain viewers, it is generally not desirable to send a client a menu, list or the like of programs that the client cannot view, because this frustrates clients. Using the above example, a client in Argentina should not see a menu of items (e.g., television shows/movies) that includes those items available for viewing only in Columbia, and vice-versa.
However, because many of the programs do overlap with respect to their availability for viewing among potential clients, it is inefficient for the data items that reference such overlapping pieces of content to be replicated for each client/type of client. For example, for efficiency it may be desirable to have only a single South American datacenter for content available in South America, even though each piece of content in that datacenter is not available to each South American client.